Six degrees of Louis Farrakhan

by Henry on January 15, 2008

I started to write a snarky post about this Richard Cohen article and then gave up. It’s too bad a piece to warrant flipness. Cohen finds out (he doesn’t say how, but this has been circulating around the nastier right wing websites for a little while) that a magazine associated with Barack Obama’s church in Chicago, and run by his pastor, honoured Louis Farrakhan last year. He then insists that Barack Obama immediately express his outrage.

It’s important to state right off that nothing in Obama’s record suggests he harbors anti-Semitic views or agrees with Wright when it comes to Farrakhan. Instead, as Obama’s top campaign aide, David Axelrod, points out, Obama often has said that he and his minister sometimes disagree. Farrakhan, Axelrod told me, is one of those instances. … But … given who the parishioner is, … could be the next American president. Where is his sense of outrage? … I don’t for a moment think that Obama shares Wright’s views on Farrakhan. But the rap on Obama is that he is a fog of a man. We know little about him, and, for all my admiration of him, I wonder about his mettle. … This time, though, “present” will not do.

Indeed, there’s nothing in Obama’s record to suggest he is an anti-Semite. Nor, for that matter, is there anything in Richard Cohen’s record to suggest that he gets his jollies watching Mickey Kaus blow goats. And while Farrakhan is undoubtedly a nasty piece of work, why is it Obama in particular who needs to condemn him? That Obama’s pastor has praised him doesn’t really cut it as a rationale – church leaders and spiritual mentors can believe and say a lot of bizarre shit that you don’t yourself subscribe to (as a mostly lapsed Catholic, I speak from experience on this point).

More specifically (to take a not-so-random example), Billy Graham, who made some unambiguously anti-Semitic remarks to Richard Nixon which ended up on tape, appears to have been a major figure in Hillary Clinton’s spiritual life (see also this speech made by Bill Clinton at the inauguration of Graham’s library last year). While nowhere close to Farrakhan’s league (he appears to have been a repentant and occasional anti-Semite rather than an unrepentant and consistent one), he was a direct influence on the Clintons rather than an influence-on-an-influence. I don’t recall Richard Cohen, or anyone else, muttering that there was no evidence that Hillary and Bill Clinton were anti-Semites, but that they needed to voice their outrage or else. And for good reason; any suggestion along these lines would have been treated as crazy. Knowing that Billy Graham was occasionally anti-Semitic doesn’t tell you anything about what Bill and Hillary Clinton believe.

There’s something else going on here. I strongly suspect that Barack Obama is being asked to condemn Louis Farrakhan not because there’s some bogus two-degrees-of-separation thing going on, but because Barack Obama is black, and because black politicians are supposed to condemn Louis Farrakhan before they can be trusted. This isn’t racism, but it’s an implicit double standard, under which black politicians have a higher hurdle to jump before they deserve public trust than white ones. More generally, this is a bad, wrongheaded, and even dangerous article. Richard Cohen shouldn’t have written it, and the Washington Post shouldn’t have printed it.

Oh my god. Cohen is awful, and here is a link to the Libby column that gave him the distinction of calling it “..not an entirely trivial matter since government officials should not lie to grand juries, but neither should they be called to account for practicing the dark art of politics. As with sex or real estate, it is often best to keep the lights off.”

Ah the Washington Post, turning out the lights for all of us.
This latest is just silly, as we could by the same standards make Cohen give his opinion on every G. Will or C. Krauthammer column ever written…

More than just because he’s black, it seems to me that this plays into the insidious attempts by some wingnuts to play Muslim confusion games – via use of the Hussein part of Obama’s name. After all, everyone knows that those dastardly Muslims are all anti-semitic. Perhaps I’m being particularly conspiracy theorist about it.

I understand your distaste for articles like Cohen’s, but I wonder whether you’re too quick to dismiss it. The information revealed and brought to the forefront by the article might, it is true be abused, but it does at least seem relevant to the discussion of who we should select as our next president. David Bernstein over at Volokh Conspiracy has had some nice posts on why the Farrakhan issue does matter: http://volokh.com/posts/chain_1200320823.shtml
While I might not agree with everything he says and I’m sure you don’t he does put a different and I think reasonable spin on things.

Mike Huckabee has himself praised John Hagee, who is arguably as odious as Farrakhan, and spoken at his church. And the most Huckabee has done to distance himself from Hagee is to say they don’t agree on some things. Cohen, though to be fair he has attacked Huckabee for religious intolerance, hasn’t ever mentioned John Hagee in his column. Yet Hagee would seem to be much more relevant to the campaign than Farrakhan, since he actually has a relationship to a candidate.

Louis Armstrong, “If ‘ya gotta ask, you ain’t ever gonna know.”
Good lord. See
Black Leadership (Chap. 11 “Black Fundamentalism: Louis Farrakhan and the Politics of Conservative Black Nationalism”) by Manning Marable.
The Farrakhan Phenomenon: Race, Reaction, and the Paranoid Style in American Politics
by Robert Singh.
In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam
by Mattias Gardell

Barack shouldn’t waste his time entertaining some guy’s paranoia and conspiratorial whispers. He shouldn’t have to pass someone’s or some group’s litmus test; and if this Cohen has a problem with Obama, then he should cast his vote in kind.

I should have been clearer in what I was saying. There are at least two kinds of racism – (1) a personal animus towards black/white/Jewish people, and (2) the kinds of practices people talk about when they refer to institutionalized racism (e.g., effectively requiring people of different races to adhere to different standards). I’d be very surprised if Cohen is guilty of the first, but I think that there is a strong case to be made that he’s guilty of the second.

Thanks for the clarification. I think, tho, that the first (ridiculously restrictive) definition is pretty much always entirely unhelpful. It’s quite possible that there are no racists in American politics by that standard. Many of the most ferocious defenders of white supremacy in this country have not felt any personal animus toward blacks and often had quite intimate relations with them.

Michael Pugliese seems to be cross-posting a bunch of comments from Yglesias to this thread. Since no one is defending Farrakhan on this thread, they’re totally off-topic here. I wouldn’t try to engage him until he actually engages the discussion here.

Don’t really care about Richard Cohen one way or the other, but I do think of Farrakhan as being closer to a David Duke than a Billy Graham, and I’d certainly want answers from any candidate who attended a church that honored David Duke.

And then there’s ‘Black Liberation Theology’ in general — it’s certainly not an outlook I’m looking for in a presidential candidate, and I think questions about it are reasonable for Obama to answer. Especially given that this is not a hierarchical denomination that he grew up in, but rather a non-hierarchical congregation he joined as an adult.

As one with libertarian sympathies who’s up in that ’empty quarter’ in the upper right of the election compass from a few days ago, it’s a given that any mainstream candidate I vote for will be pretty far away on many issues. But Farrakhan is kind of a deal-breaker.

I expect though, we will see a ‘Sister Souljah’ Moment’ on all this from Obama — but just not until after the South Carolina primary at least.

– Refuse to hire blacks on the assumption that they are likely to be underqualified;

– Have a strong preference for racially segregated neighborhoods;

– Believe that blacks are inherently and significantly less intelligent than whites;

– Support policing practices that explicitly and deliberately single out black men;

– Assume that successful blacks probably did not succeed on their own merits but through some form racial preference;

and not be a racist — well, it’s not just not a helpful definition, it isn’t really a definition of racism at all.

And yet while millions of white Americans fit those five criteria, the vast majority could honestly say they feel no “personal animus” toward blacks. Many have black friends or acquaintances; almost all admire black entertainers. “Some of their best friends” might even be black. So a definition of racism based on personal animus misses pretty much the entire phenomenon of racism in the US.

This isn’t so much a criticism of you personally as of the incredibly stupid way we talk about race in this country. But letting Cohen off the hook here is giving in to that stupidity; let’s not.

We uaed to see this in NYC all the time when David Dinkins was mayor, and when Jesse Jackson was relevant. They were treated like America’s Official Negroes, and were expected, for reasons never articulated, to issue ritual denunciations of any black whack-job anyone cared to publicize, however unconnected with Dinkins or Jackson. I hope Obama can figure a way out of this trap, because it’s tiresome.

I used to like Richard Cohen but some time ago, I think it was right after 9/11 but cannot really pinpoint it, he started writing columns that I thought seemed completely driven by his pro-Israel views. He reminds me often of Senator Lieberman, who is quite progressive on almost all issues except those dealing with the Middle East. I would read this column in that vein.

Yes, Professor Farrell, that’s all very well, but I have reason to believe you may be an academic. I therefore refuse to pay attention to your argument until you denounce Ward Churchill to my satisfaction.

I strongly suspect that Barack Obama is being asked to condemn Louis Farrakhan not because there’s some bogus two-degrees-of-separation thing going on, but because Barack Obama is black, and because black politicians are supposed to condemn Louis Farrakhan before they can be trusted

Farrakhan disapeared after 911 for quite sometime. Its safe to come out now, because bowing to the East is the new go West young man. I love this country, but what a bunch of pacifistic pussy’s we have become due to forced fed Tollerance. Lets all listen to some Eclectic music and relate to piss ants from a third world nation shall we.

Richard Cohen has been at this for 21 years, dating back to one of the first issues of the Washington Post Magazine in which he posited shopowners who do not allow blacks under the age of 30ish to shop in their stores are absolutely being prudent. He followed up with a defense of that column, then proceeded to wax poetic on women dressing like prostitutes. The women bashing was while he was in the middle of a sexual harrassment issue with (drumroll please) a black woman.

It’s funny how this “you must denounce so-and-so” game never seems to apply to Republicans and the crazies they hang with.

So since Richard Cohen is a good Jewish boy, some advice from Deuteronomy:

Do not have two differing weights in your bag—one heavy, one light. Do not have two differing measures in your house—one large, one small. You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you. For the LORD your God detests anyone who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly.

I strongly suspect that Barack Obama is being asked to condemn Louis Farrakhan because Cohen knows that this could be very damaging to Obama’s campaign. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Cohen did this as a favor to the Clintons at a crucial moment in the campaign. It introduces some potent FUD into the campaign, questioning Obama’s judgment and electability at the same time. Of course there is a racial element to this, since many white and black voters will have questioned Obama’s electability and any association with Farrakhan cannot help. People are being naive if they don’t think this will hurt Obama.

IF (and it’s a capital letter BIG if) the idea is that a black politician must expres outrage about Farrakhan to be credible – while no white politician has to express outrage about any white anti-semite (David Duke?) to be credible – then this is racism, pure and unadulterated.

It might hurt him with black voters in South Carolina, but it should help in the general election. Which is why I cynically expected to hear this comment from Obama later. So kudos to Obama for not taking the most politically expedient route.

Clearly, nobody here has read Obama’s 1995 autobiography “Dreams from My Father.” If you had read pages 274-295, which are mostly about the origin of Obama’s relationship with Wright in the mid 1980s, you would know that Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. is not some minor figure in Obama’s life. He is the most important man in Obama’s life since his grandfather who raised him in Hawaii.

I agree with katherine, way above – it’s might be more of a “Muslim” thing than a black thing. Black militant Muslim, Obama.

I think Cohen is a joke, as is the Washington Post. And it’s not just the lying propagandist f#@ks on the editorial pages either, unfortunately. We need to discount almost everything they say, at least when it comes to foreign policy and the Middle East.

I don’t really know why people were so sure that the media was treating Hillary unfairly a week or two ago. Hillary is their candidate. She’s made the right hawk noises. Of course, the press can’t resist the catty little digs at her, but she’s still their candidate.

blah: “It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Cohen did this as a favor to the Clintons at a crucial moment in the campaign”

Not as a favor to them, but as a favor to himself. Cohen is one of the hacks drooling at the prospect of a second Clinton administration, knowing that they can recycle all of the sh*t which wasn’t even fit to print the first time.

Who wouldn’t like a shot at 4-8 years of xeroxing your old work and getting paid big bucks for it?

This is all well and good, but I need to know: what is Obama’s position on Michael Vick? And does he think O.J. is innocent or guilty? These are all relevant campaign issues.

The Obama campaign has now released statements denouncing Vick and O.J. Remarkably, however, the candidate remains silent on “Cop Killer,” the recent rap song by “Iced Tea” that calls for the murder of police officers.

HenryFarrell- There are at least two kinds of racism – (1) a personal animus towards black/white/Jewish people…
More accurate to say each racist sentiment is unique to its bearer. Some inherited, some traumatically induced, some fashionable, some cathartic, some sadistic.
Cohen probably doesn’t have an itemizable animus in the public record because he lives and works and plays inside a fortress of security and filtered contacts. So he doesn’t encounter any blacks who haven’t been so thoroughly vetted by his social clads and their doormen and gatekeepers they might as well be brought fettered and chained into propriety.
If he did, if he lived at the edge or inside one of the parallel worlds where most American blacks are living today, his chauvinist-driven racism would be much easier to graph. Art Speigelman did a nifty bit back in the 90’s about his dad’s anti-black racism (“Dem schwartzers!”)that illustrates that pretty well.
All this yadda about Farrakhan is part and parcel of the one true sword of public morality now – triangulation. Same with David Duke a while back. Everybody knows these are evil men, though the specifics of their evil don’t get much confirmation, arriving as it does ready-made and established. Talking stink about Ward Churchill with basically only one out of context phrase to bolster smug complacency is the academist’s version.
Public, official, sanctioned racism’s waxing and waning of acceptability is interesting if condemnatory – anti-Japanese hysteria during WW2 etc. We were all thinking we’d out grown that, weren’t we? Until 9/11 changed everything back again.
Cohen and his brothers-in-arms have produced a disgustingly unchallenged flood of anti-Muslim bigotry over the last decade or so, and the mediated American public has taken that bigotry into its bosom as its own.

“Be it Mike Huckabee’s visit to Anti-Catholic Cornerstone Church, John McCain’s “gook” gaffe, Fred Thompson’s relationship with former senator (and Macaca Master) George Allen or Ron Paul’s racist and ranting Paulisms, there are many denouncements and explanations to be made, though only Obama pays the price.

The attention that Warpublicans have paid to Obama’s church and its leader Jeremiah Wright, and the concerted effort to connect Louis Farrakhan to the Obama campaign, reeks of a double standard and political intrigue, if not a low-grade racism, intended or not.”

Now I’m curious as to why does someone’s pro-ness mean that they’re anti anything. Just because I’m pro-black doesn’t mean that I’m anti-white, anti-Semitic or anti any other ethinic group. It seems to me that if someone dare speak against, be it founded or unfounded claims, Jewish people then it is considered some form of hate and we quickly hear from the Anti-Defamation League who’s issued a statement against this person. BUT, when someone allows a slip of a tongue, such as about the sportscaster who suggested that the other players “lynch Tiger Woods in a back alley” then everyone is up in arms saying that Jesse Jackson et. al. is race baiting?

It appears to me that there is DEFINITELY a double standard. If you speak against whites, Jews or anyone else who has a substantially fairer skin tone, then its considered a hate crime. But, if you speak against African Americans, Latinos or any of the darker people of the world, then its protected by freedom of speech.

On Oct. 5, 2000, the following article appeared on the website of the Media Research Council, (which appears to criticize the media from a right wing perspective) in Media Reality Check, (described, on its masthead as “A Weekly Report of Major News Stories Distorted or Ignored)

Lieberman Respects Farrakhan: No Story?-After Eight Days, Most of the Press Still Missing, Despite Question to Clinton, Fox’s Grilling of Daley

On September 27, eight days ago, the first press reports revealed that Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman said he would be willing to meet with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who has called Judaism, Lieberman’s faith, a “gutter religion.”

In an interview with April Ryan of the American Urban Radio Networks, Lieberman said, “Look, Minister Farrakhan said a few things earlier in the campaign that were just not informed. But I have respect for him, and I have respect for the Muslim community generally.”

Where’s the furor? The story first came on Wednesday from the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jodi Enda and hit the Knight-Ridder national wire. USA Today mentioned it. Ryan questioned President Clinton about it in a briefing aired live on CNN. Clinton seemed surprised: “I didn’t understand. What did you say about Joe Lieberman and Louis Farrakhan?” When Ryan explained that “Joe Lieberman told me yesterday” that he would meet with Farrakhan, Clinton only said, “Well, if anybody has got the standing to do it, he certainly does.”

That night, Ryan appeared on Fox’s O’Reilly Factor. Host Bill O’Reilly asked if she challenged Lieberman on his statement. She said yes: “He said, but it’s time for us to come together. And he’s trying to win. That’s basically what it is. He wants to win an election and the African-American vote is crucial.”

Last Thursday, the story was picked up by UPI and the Associated Press in the tenth paragraph of a story on the upcoming “Million Family March.” On Friday, the Anti-Defamation League, whose earlier criticism of Lieberman for religious talk on the stump drew all-network coverage, warned Lieberman would be “legitimizing a bigot.”

It hit television on Sunday. On NBC’s Meet the Press, Tim Russert asked Rick Lazio if he’d meet with Farrakhan. (He said no.) On Fox News Sunday, Tony Snow asked Gore campaign chairman Bill Daley about Lieberman. “Does he do that with the Vice President’s blessing?” Daley said no, “Joe makes those decisions on his own. He obviously doesn’t have to get approval from Al Gore to have meetings.”

On Monday, AP reported its first full story on Lieberman’s remarks, based on criticism from RNC Chairman Jim Nicholson. On Tuesday, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote about it, concluding, “It would be hard now for Lieberman to repudiate Farrakhan, but it would be harder still for us to respect someone who will not.”

But now, eight days in, let’s list who is still missing on this story: The New York Times. The Los Angeles Times. The Washington Post news pages. Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. CBS. CNN’s newscasts. NBC’s newscasts. ABC arrived this morning. Are the media being tough on both sides? Can a press corps that celebrated Lieberman’s faith now ignore it? — Tim Graham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Joseph Lieberman said Tuesday he was willing to meet Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader who has been criticized for anti-Semitic remarks and has questioned the Democratic vice presidential nominee’s loyalty.

Lieberman [said]..in an interview he respected Farrakhan and was open to meeting with him to promote reconciliation in the United States.

[Lieberman]… came under fire from Farrakhan in August, when … the controversial black leader …questioned whether Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, might be more loyal to Israel to the United States.

Asked if he was willing to meet Farrakhan, Lieberman told the radio network: “I am very open to that.”

“Minister Farrakhan has said a few things, including earlier in the campaign, that I thought were just not informed but, you know, I have respect for him and I have respect for the Muslim community generally,” Lieberman said.

“I’d be open to sitting and talking to Minister Farrakhan. It hasn’t sort of come together yet but I look forward to it,” he added. “This is a time to try to knit the country together more and to make us, as (Vice President) Al Gore always says, the more perfect union that our founders dreamed of.”

Lieberman said he would like to meet before the “Million Family March” Farrakhan is organizing in Washington on Oct. 16, the fifth anniversary of the Million Man March aimed at empowering black men.

Farrakhan has often been criticized for his strident rhetoric, which includes calling whites “devils,” referring to Jewish, Arab and Asian businessmen in black communities as “bloodsuckers” and denouncing the pope as “the anti-Christ.”

Lieberman said he admired Farrakhan for his efforts to register voters ahead of the Nov. 7 election…Asked if he would like to meet before the “Million Family March,” Lieberman said: “I’d like to do that. I think that’s a great idea.

“I look at anything that anybody does to get people to register and to vote (as) really at the heart of what the democracy is about,” he added. “So I admire what Minister Farrakhan is doing there.”

He also said he was not bothered by any criticism he gets for such a meeting, saying his wife Hadassah often jokes about his stubbornness when he decides to do something.

“She says … Joe listens but he gets stubborn when he decides he wants to do something, he does it,” Lieberman said. “That’s the way I feel about this. By my nature I’m an optimist and I’m a bridge builder and that’s what this is all about.”